‘The majority cannot separate the flag from the police because when it comes to controlling the culture, they are the police.’
Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

I was 23 years old in April 1992, when a Simi Valley jury infamously acquitted the four officers charged with the vicious, unknowingly videotaped beating of Rodney King. I was a nobody, just an editorial assistant at the Oakland Tribune attending San Francisco State University, but I had thoughts.

I believed that despite the national outrage – which was followed by the worst rioting in the history of the nation – an acquittal was the only possible outcome for an America that, in the famous phrase of Martin Luther King Jr, consistently chose order over justice. To acknowledge the guilt of the officers in a court of law, I remember writing, would have required the white mainstream to acknowledge the historical black grievance of police brutality, which it has never done. Secondarily, it would also have to acknowledge that police were not only capable of acting abhorrently but actually did so routinely. White society, I wrote, was not ready to acknowledge either. I concluded the leap was too great.

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Mary Ellen Butler, the Tribune op-ed editor, did not seem to appreciate what she considered a radical opinion, especially coming from a college student whose job it was to open mail and retrieve the afternoon papers. She stripped the story of its life, then published it not as a bold thought piece by a young reporter with thoughts – but as a letter to the editor, just some random dude at a typewriter. It was an insult, a pat on the head to go back to the kids’ table.

Twenty-six years later, the writer is older, but the issue remains. The mainstream continues to be confronted with abhorrent police behavior, from Stephon Clark being shot and killed by police in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento to Daniel Shaver being shot at point blank range while on the floor pleading for his life by police in Mesa, Arizona, the same department that caught on video security footage last week six of its officers beating an unarmed suspect near an elevator. For the last four years, the youth have blocked traffic, on freeways and at airports. The ballplayers have knelt, worn t-shirts, raised fists, been blackballed, yet the discussion, from the president to NFL owners, is centered not on the latest horrifying YouTube dashcam footage, but on the American flag.

The ones who see the stubborn, deliberate misdirection away from police and toward the flag scream futilely to the heavens and argue on social media so often you can practically hear them in your sleep. They aren’t protesting the flag. They ask the question: “How did this go from police brutality to being about the flag?” while already knowing the answer: for the white mainstream, it never left being about the flag.

In framing The Heritage, I saw black athletes shaped by a particular hierarchy:

White owners.

White coaches.

White season ticket buyers.

White media.

Black players.

This is the structure of American sports. It is the framework through which American sports is packaged, marketed, reported and sold to the public. Each movement of the black player, and especially today’s revival of black player protest, is filtered through the lens of these four entities above him, and none – especially the media in what has been a spectacularly epic journalistic fail – has ever had the courage to filter black protest through the lens of the black player grievance because, like the Simi Valley jury 26 years ago, it would require the white mainstream to relinquish its historical advantages.

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Viewing Colin Kaepernick’s decision to risk his career through the lens of Tamir Rice’s dead, 12-year-old body would mean being unprotected from the luxury position of being able to tell people how to feel, of dictating what is appropriate and what is not. It would require viewing police through the lens of the despised, not as a member of the protected majority class for whom dialing 911 poses no risk but is a common sense thing to do.

Viewing Eric Reid’s decision to kneel before every game during a free agent season when the president of the United States has referred to people like him as “SOBs” who “maybe shouldn’t be in the country” through the lens of police shooting and killing Alton Sterling for selling CD would require leagues to maybe rethink the dozens of “law enforcement appreciation nights” peppered across the home schedules of every team in every sport. It would also require Nike to maybe rethink those post-9/11 apparel discounts it offers military and law enforcement.

‘The flag provides them enormous cover. It allows media and the public to never have to listen.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The mainstream machine would not expose itself to such vulnerability, and the alternative is to focus on the flag. The flag is all they know. It provides them enormous cover. And power. It means they never have to listen. It allows each of the four entities above the black player to feel in control of the narrative, of the why of it all, of the conversation and the moral high ground (“there are other ways to protest”). It allows the powerful – by which I mean to say the majority – to remain in the comfortable position of viewing protest through the lens of itself, of what offends it. It is to reveal that the white media – when its members go home and take their kids whose tee-ball team is coached by the neighbor dad who happens to be a cop – has more in common with the power than the powerless.

To cover an issue through the lens of the oppressor – whether the issue is gender from a male perspective, class from a wealth perspective, race from a white perspective – is to also be the oppressor. The flag even allows the majority to reverse roles and be the aggrieved, for framing black grievance as a protest against the flag means they and not the dead black citizens are the ones actually under attack.

Within this framework even the flag itself is being distorted, both by a demagogic president and a pliant media from a symbol of ideals to an authoritarian allegiance to military and police. Black grievance can be dismissed, and if the unpatriotic kneelers don’t like it, as the president has said, maybe they don’t belong in the country.

Focusing on the anthem allows the majority to ignore a reality – a policeman kicking the hell out of a family member for pure sadistic enjoyment – that is unthinkable to them and reposition unrest through the lens of the very familiar: the flag and the police as unequivocal, uncomplicated ally. It is to go back to Simi Valley: viewing protest any other way would force them to reconsider themselves and their comforts, that their heroes may not be so heroic after all, and that maybe justice isn’t so just. Better to have order. Better to remain in control.

Whether the filter is the white owners who create national anthem policies to be obeyed, white coaches who with only few exceptions oversee black men without understanding them and supporting them, white ticket buyers and the white media who reflect and are comforted by the status quo, the majority cannot separate the flag from the police because when it comes to controlling the culture, they are the police.

Howard Bryant is a columnist for ESPN the Magazine and the author of The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism.